The Barn House (21 page)

The thieves had pried it open, then carried the two mantelpieces (both close to six feet tall and perhaps four feet wide) out of the house, down the steps, and out to their vehicle, and in addition had taken the tools and copper pipe, which I knew from experience was capable of making a racket that would have rousted the deaf. Yet, I ruefully ascertained later, none of the neighbors had detected any sign of this protracted criminal adventure. We were surrounded by the soundest sleepers on earth.

By the time the police left, my initial anger had subsided, to be replaced by paranoia. You can imagine how I felt. Up to this point the project had been . . . well, fun is perhaps putting the issue a little strongly, but it had had its entertaining moments. Now matters had taken a decidedly darker turn. I imagined thieves lurking in every gangway, awaiting a moment's inattention on my part to infiltrate the premises and carry off such valuables as the first crew had overlooked. I knew too well that the best burglar alarm was the one thing we couldn't provide—human habitation. I'd read about buildings in crime-ridden parts of town that had been abandoned, or merely left unattended for a few days, and which had been descended upon by thieves and stripped of all saleable commodities, including appliances, cabinets, doors, electrical and plumbing fixtures, even pipe and wiring ripped from the walls. At the time I had been dismayed but detached, as though reading of a plague outbreak in Sri Lanka. Now those stories seemed more pertinent.

Previously innocent phenomena took on a sinister character. For many years in our old neighborhood we'd been accustomed to seeing scavengers prowling the alleys looking for discarded aluminum cans to sell at the recycling yards. We referred to these entrepreneurs as the metal guys. They used shopping carts piled to tottering heights with the day's take, which they'd stuffed in plastic bags. Some of my neighbors objected to the metal guys—in mining the garbage cans they had a tendency to leave the alley strewn with rubbish, after the manner of bears at national parks. I took a more tolerant view—partly because of the metal guys, I was interested to learn, aluminum had by far the highest recycling rate of any commonly available consumer packaging material. Plus it kept them off the street.

In the Barn House's neighborhood the grocery-cart boys, who from a socioeconomic perspective one would have to categorize mainly as stumblebums, were joined by a more ambitious working-class type of scavenger who added a degree of mechanization to the program in the form of decrepit trucks. They cruised through the alleys looking for larger and presumably more profitable items, such as discarded washing machines, water heaters, bedsprings, and the like. In many respects these fellows performed a useful service. An appliance dealer commonly charged a fee to haul away your old refrigerator, but in the city you could leave it in the alley, confident that in days (or in one case less than an hour) it would be gone.

These operations were sometimes marked by an excess of enthusiasm. At an early stage of demolition we had hauled out a couple of ancient clawfoot bathtubs and dumped them in the backyard. I had no further use for the tubs, but one of Charlie's colleagues had expressed a mild interest in obtaining one—they'd become fashionable in some quarters. Before we could arrange the transfer, though, the tubs disappeared. I suspected a trucker who lived in the building behind us, but not knowing for certain (he professed innocence), and not being especially upset anyway about the disappearance of what I personally considered junk, I attempted merely to establish a few ground rules upon our next encounter—for example, no removal of items still attached to or clearly within the ambit of the house. The trucker took this well enough and I felt we'd reached an understanding.

The burglary obliged me to reassess the situation. I didn't suspect the metal guys, at least the ones I knew, but it seemed to me now that they were but one species of beetle in the larger urban habitat, not all denizens of which were benign. Previously I'd been in the habit of driving around with ladders and building materials casually roped to the roof of my car. Now this practice seemed unwise.

I considered my options. My basement storeroom was still full of building materials, mostly electrical supplies. On a per-pound basis they were worth less than the copper pipe, but all told the stuff had cost me close to fifteen hundred dollars. There was no point in buying a bigger latch; the closet's wooden walls were flimsy and easily breached. I walked down to Mike's house and asked if I might store my supplies in his basement. He consented at once. I spent well over an hour moving boxes of fittings and bundles of conduit. The day was cold and dry, a little above freezing, the sky an expectant teal and gray—the kind of day that under other circumstances would incline one to inspect the furnace and check the rock salt.

By the time I finished, daylight was rapidly failing. I drove to the home improvement store and bought four pairs of spotlights. When I returned I nailed them high on the four sides of the house, strung wire back to the sole live electrical outlet remaining on the second floor, and switched on the lights. They illuminated the front, rear, and side yards with a concentration-camp glow. I asked my neighbors to keep an eye out, particularly if the lights went off; they promised they would. My anxiety abated only slightly. I couldn't think what else to do.

 

O
ver the next three weeks I piped all the radiators in the front of the house. The Chief came over when he could. The process was tedious. I had to change the fittings on each radiator, manhandle it into position, mark holes in the floor for the supply pipes, move the radiator out of the way, drill the holes, push the radiator back, solder a length of pipe to each brass radiator valve and return elbow, attach the fittings to the radiators, then go downstairs and plot out how to run pipe to the nearest riser.

Installing radiator pipes was far more nerve-wracking than electrical work. For one thing, there was a much greater chance that you would burn down the house. With electrical work, this was largely a theoretical danger, since under normal circumstances you worked with the power shut off. But piping involved the continual use of open flame, produced by the propane torch used to solder the joints.

Some joints you could solder at the bench, and many of the others weren't close to combustible material, but inevitably a few required dancing the flame off some piece of unplaned lumber that had been drying out since the Garfield administration and seemed likely to ignite if exposed to a warm breath. I attempted to direct the flame away from flammable surfaces to the extent practical, but often it was impossible to avoid scorching the wood, and occasionally the ancient timber would catch fire. I frantically doused the flames when this occurred, having filled a spray bottle with water for the purpose, but the illumination was poor and it was hard to see what I was doing. I lived in dread lest I leave for the day and some overlooked ember flare up anew.

Not for the first or last time the Chief lent a steadying hand. One day he showed up a little later than usual. “I went shopping,” he said. “I thought you could use some stuff.” He laid his purchases one at a time on my workbench.

“Clamp lights,” he said. He produced three incandescent work lights, each with a metal reflector, a long cord, and a clamp on a swivel. You clamped the light on a board or pipe near where you were working, and aimed it at the job. Better lighting would improve the safety factor by a considerable margin. Cost: about eight dollars.

“Rags.” The Chief had gotten a bundle at an auto parts store. I was going through rags at a great rate, wiping excess flux off solder joints. I had nearly exhausted our household supply of old sheets and shirts.

“Lemon Gojo.” It was a tub of hand cleaner. “When I'm working on a car I always wash my hands with this stuff,” the Chief said. “Cuts through the grease, doesn't dry out your hands. After you spend all day on a cruddy job, use this and you'll feel like you're clean.” It was true. Washing up with Gojo became an end-of-day rite.

Items of small consequence, you may think. They didn't seem that way to me. Overwhelmed by the job in those days, I had no patience for housekeeping. The Chief did, and his domestic contributions lightened a burden that, looking back, I wonder how I would otherwise have borne.

 

O
ver the ensuing weeks the front loop gradually took shape. I was self-employed and could work at the house when other business didn't press, but under the best of circumstances, what with the need of making a living and the bales of paperwork required by the bank, I could arrange to be there at most three days a week. Even with the proper tool, drilling holes through the joists and fitting the pipes was a slow job. The mild fall weather had now ended; it was cold in the house. One morning Tony's men had arrived to find a thin sheet of ice in the toilet bowl. They installed a space heater in the dining room, in the process, I noted with chagrin, drilling a hole through the much-abused parquet floor to bring a gas line up from the basement. The space heater kept the house's interior temperature above freezing for the time being, but it wasn't yet full winter. I was none too confident that we'd be able to avoid having the water supply pipes freeze in the event of sustained cold.

Meanwhile I fretted about the job. A problem only slightly less worrisome than the danger of fire was that I had no idea if my solder joints would hold water. On occasions when I could do a joint at the workbench, it was easy enough to see that a good seal had been made. But most of the time the pipes were soldered in place, often in tight spots where it was impossible to view the entire circumference of the joint. I bought a little inspection mirror mounted on a swivel rod to enable me to see the backside of a fitting, but lacking experience in such matters I was uncertain what to look for. I dreaded the prospect of filling the system only to have the joints spout leaks like my father's bathroom plumbing. A drawback of copper pipe was that, while a proper joint wouldn't leak and required no further attention, repairing a bad one was a bear. It was tricky enough to solder a joint when the pipes were dry; it was impossible when they were filled with water, which cooled the copper below the melting point of the solder. The system would have to be drained, and even then a residual trickle could dissipate the heat. Redoing a single joint could take an hour.
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Things got harder still when I got down to the basement. Here the tributaries of the system joined together, and the pipes got bigger. Three-quarter- and one-inch risers ran into inch-and-a-half collectors and finally into two-inch mains at the furnace. The bigger the pipe, the harder it was to heat the joints. In some cases Chief and I had to apply two torches simultaneously. But even multiple propane torches were useless for heating the two-inch joints. The only thing to do was call Kevin the plumber. He brought over a torch and a big tank of acetylene, which burned hotter than propane and pumped out a lot more flame, and soldered the remaining dozen joints. It took him maybe half an hour. The front loop was complete at last.

And none too soon. It was December 27th; several days of single-digit temperatures were predicted. Christmas had come and gone—I had eaten roast duck at my father-in-law's with an ineradicable rind of dirt under my fingernails. I arrived at the house early; the Chief had promised to come later.

All that remained was to fill the radiators with water and light the furnace. With the assistance of the Polish carpenters I'd moved the furnace to a new location in the center of the house, Paul the fireplace guy had hooked the exhaust flue to the chimney, and Kevin's boys had run in a new gas line. But the burners had never been lit. I opened the water intake, filled the boiler, wired up a thermostat, then flipped the switch. The automatic pilot made a staticky sound. But the flame didn't light.

The furnace had been covered with grit; I wondered if dirt had fouled the burners. I poked around a while. I knew nothing about furnaces; I might as well have been inspecting an atomic pile. I called the gas company. They said they'd send someone out later that day. I decided to finish filling the system, a slow process that took several hours. I inspected the joints anxiously, looking for leaks, but no moisture appeared. By early afternoon the water had reached the second floor. I noticed a dripping sound. Water was leaking from a threaded joint on a brass valve in what would eventually be a bedroom. I tightened the fitting. The leak slowed but persisted. I tightened some more. The fitting cracked. Damn. I shut off the water intake and opened the furnace drain. The water had just reached the level of the broken valve; if I backed it down a few inches I figured I could reheat the solder joint and replace the valve. After a few minutes the leak stopped; the water had drained below the break. I waited another ten minutes, closed the drain, then applied the torch. The solder melted. I replaced the valve, then resumed filling. I'd lost an hour.

It was now late afternoon and the light was fading. The gas man hadn't yet appeared. The Chief arrived and I explained the situation. He inspected the furnace. “It's a new gas line,” he said. “Maybe there's air in it.” He tinkered awhile without result. “Quit messing around there, Chief,” I said. “Let's let the professionals do it.”

I called the gas company back. It was now close to five o'clock and fully dark. I was told the gas man had rung the front doorbell and, when he got no answer, concluded that no one was home and left. “The doorbell was disconnected!” I shouted. “The house is under renovation! Did it occur to him to come round the back?” Evidently not. The earliest they could get him out again was the following morning. I was furious, but there was nothing to be done. It was a bitterly cold night; the newspaper had predicted a low of 7 degrees. If I left things as they were the water would freeze and burst the pipes. I would have to drain the system, wasting all the time needed to fill it. I shut off the water intake and got ready to open the drain.